Correlations of plasticity in sheared glasses

Abstract: In a paper [S. Mandal et al., Phys. Rev. E 88, 022129 (2013)] the nature of spatial correlations of plasticity in hard sphere glasses was addressed both via computer simulations and in experiments. It was found that the experimentally obtained correlations obey a power law whereas the correlations from simulations are better fitted by an exponential decay. We here provide direct evidence--- via simulations of a hard sphere glass in 2D---that this discrepancy is a consequence of the finite system size in the 3D simulations. By extending the study to a 2D soft disk model at zero temperature, the robustness of the power-law decay in sheared amorphous solids is underlined. Deviations from a power law occur when either reducing the packing fraction towards the supercooled regime in the case of hard spheres or changing the dissipation mechanism from contact dissipation to a mean-field type drag for the case of soft disks.